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The Veil – Destination Nightmare (1958)

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vdestination02“Our story begins in Europe where Peter Wade has established a thriving air service.” It would have been nice for Karloff to tell us whether he meant Peter Jr or Sr. And just why would you write a screenplay and give two of the characters exactly the same name? “Hi, I’m Henry Jones, Sr. — they call me Indiana too!”

One of the flying Petes is co-pilot on a cargo run when he sees a ghostly disembodied head outside his cockpit window.  Until we see the other Pete, there is no way to know if he is Jr or Sr.  The head tells him, “Look at me.  Follow me.  1-3-5, 1-3-5, 1-3-5.”  When he makes a sudden course correction, the pilot comes back into the cockpit and wrestles the controls from him.

Back on the ground, Pete Sr. (played by Boris Karloff, so I think it is safe to say that just-plain-Pete is dead) asks Pete Jr why he deliberately headed for a crash.  Jr. says he is a wash-out as a flyer and probably can’t run the company either.  What he really wants to do is dance design planes.  Sr immediately strokes him a check to complete the last 2 years of graduate school to become an engineer.  But he puts it under a paperweight [1] until such time that “you feel you really earned the right to go to graduate school.”  Jr takes the check and heads to New York.

vdestination06That night, Sr is having nightmares about the war and a B-17 crash that killed his friend Wally Huffner.  Jr comes in to wake him up.  Sr says they were in a plane that was hit by the Jerrys in WWII.  Sr gave Wally his parachute and was able to pilot the damaged plane to the ground.  Sadly, Wally croaked, or more accurately splatted as the chute didn’t open; or maybe it had been replaced by a share of M&M Enterprises.[2]

Looking around the office, Jr finds a picture on the wall of Sr and the man whose head was hovering outside his cockpit window.  Jr takes a plane up on the same route they flew earlier.  He sees nothing until the pilot goes into the back to get a cup of coffee.  Jr locks the pilot out and tells him to bail out if anything goes wrong — because that worked so well for Wally.  Jr once again sees the giant floating head, and it repeats the same message, “Look at me.  Follow me.  1-3-5, 1-3-5, 1-3-5.”  Jr follows that heading and the plane soars around more erratically than Tyler Fitzgerald’s.  After nearly plowing into a mountain ridge, the head then tells him, “Bail out, bail out, bail out.”  Jr lets the pilot back into the cockpit, then grabs a parachute and jumps out of the plane.

Jr finds debris from a B-17 crash in the same area his father’s plane went down in WWII.  When he brushes the branches away from the fuselage, he sees a drawing of the same gremlin that is weighting down paper on his father’s desk.  Jr brings some of the pieces back.

Jr tells Sr that he saw Wally’s ghostly face and his voice.  He shows Sr a parachute with the serial number 0-1636184.  Jr uses this evidence to tell his father that another man died in that crashed plane — Wally Huffner.  Sr took Wally’s parachute back in the war and Wally died in the crash.  Well, at least, not long before the crash — Wally could not be captured by the Germans so he insisted Sr give him his cyanide tablet.

Jr explains to his father that Wally was wounded and could not have pulled the rip cord on the parachute anyway.  So it is not his fault that Wally had to stay on the plane and die in the crash.

These are some pretty thin stories.  It is no shock that they were shelved.  They look great and the performances are fine.  However, the scripts and the concept are just too simple.  The bombastic title Destination Nightmare was just setting the audience up for a disappointment.

I rate it a 1 . . . 3 . . . no, a 5.

Post-Post:

  • [1] The paperweight is a gremlin with 0-1636184 on the base.  It is explained later in the episode.
  • [2] For the love of God, why are you still here?  Go read something that’s actually funny.
  • The most impressive thing about this series so far is the picture on Amazon.  How the hell do they get that thing to look so 3D?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Morning of the Bride (02/15/59)

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Newlywed Helen wakes up and reaches over for her new husband Phil.  He is not in bed, which I guess accounts for them sharing a bed. On 1950’s TV, if he were still in bed, they would have had twin beds. That’s some catch, that Catch-22. She leaves her room, stares at the bedroom door of her mother-in-law who she has somehow never met.

Helen thinks back to five years ago when she had dinner with her mother-in-law — well, almost.  As she is preparing, she gets a visit from her roommate Pat [1].  And, thank God too, because Helen had neglected to put her shoes on yet.  This is treated as catastrophic, “To meet Mrs. Pryor without my shoes on?  I would have just died.”  Pat says she will slip out the back door.

Phil arrives without his mother.  It just so happened that he got his orders to ship out to Korea that night, so the little hootenanny was cancelled.  With Helen’s roommate gone, Phil’s mother absent, candles lit, his gal dolled up with shoes and everything, him shipping out to Korea . . . he gives her a kiss on the forehead and leaves.

ahpmorningbride04Seconds after the door shuts — there is not even an edit — Pat returns and says, “Helen, I’m sorry.”  There is just no way she could have known what just happened unless she was spying on them, hoping to witness some hot shipping-out-tomorrow sex.

Helen flashforwards, but not yet to present day.  She recalls when Phil returned after the Korean War was cancelled [2].  They meet on a park bench and Studly asks if she is proud of him, “I feel like a kid with a good report card.  I want my head patted.”  He talks about his job and his mother.  He still hasn’t gotten around to telling Mom that he and Helen are a couple, though.  He has to run back to work, but promises to inform his mother in a month or two.

Flashing a little further forward, Helen decides to go see Phil’s mother on her own.  As she approaches the house, she sees a woman rushing away.  She calls out to her, but the woman shouts back, “There’s no one here!  No one at all!”

Later, at a restaurant, Phil gives Helen a present from his mother — David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  Psycho by Robert Bloch would have been a better choice, and was published the same year this episode aired.  He tells Helen that the woman at the house couldn’t have been his mother because she is practically bed-ridden.  He suggests that it must have been Mrs. Beasely, the cleaning woman — a yuge flaw in the screenplay. [3]

Helen tells Phil that she is dumping him.  He asks her to marry him immediately, so all is peachy again.  They get hitched that night and return to the house he shares with his mother.

Back in the present, Helen goes to Mrs. Pryor’s room.  In the empty room, she finds an obituary for Mrs. Pryor which is ten years old.  Phil appears in the doorway and Helen says, “I don’t understand.  She’s been dead for seven years.”  So I guess reports of her death were widely exaggerated for 3 years.  Phil gets a shawl from the closet and says, “You never remember to keep warm, mother.  You’ll get another chill if I don’t watch over you every minute.”  Yuge flaw #2. [4]

ahpmorningbride18Helen, horrified:  “Oh, no no no.”

Post-Post:

  • [1] Pat Hitchcock, making her 8th appearance on the show.  In a departure, her average looks are not used against her.  Despite being the boss’s daughter, she is usually cast as the schoolmarm, a maid, or as the office nottie for a cheap joke.  I do find it amusing that a review at IMDb still refers to her as a maid even though she is clearly a roommate.  But who says maids can’t be hot?
  • [2] Which lasted 11 years as we public school graduates know.
  • [3] Not so much a flaw as a missed opportunity.  I would rather it had been Phil in his mother’s clothes being caught.  I guess that would have been a little crazy for TV in 1959.
  • [4] The direction here — by a good director — baffles me.  Phil gets a shawl from the closet, then drapes it over . . . what?  The camera never drops below his chest.  Did it fall to the floor?  Was there an empty chair that Mom used to sit in?
  • Then Phil bizarrely bugs his eyes out as he looks where his imaginary mother is imaginarily sitting.  Then he scans across, directly into the camera for just a second.  Then his eyes meet Helen’s.  He raises his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Well, what do you think?”  I am baffled.  If he knows this is a sham, why the funny faces.  Or if he truly believes his mother is sitting there, why the funny faces?
  • Barbara Bel Geddes (Helen) is best remembered as Miss Ellie on Dallas.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Pat Hitchcock still hanging in there.
  • Hulu still sucks.

Twilight Zone – A Message from Charity (11/01/85)

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tzmessagecharity1There are multiple reasons for me to not like this.  1) After getting off easy with a 10-minute segment yesterday, I’m left with a 37-minute chore. 2) It stars an uninteresting actor from a so-so Star Trek series . . . as a kid. 3) It is the kindler / gentler Twilight Zone as seen in If She Dies and Ye Gods.  And yet . . .

In 1700, Farmer Hoggett is worried about his daughter Charity who is sick with fever.  The doctor in this small Pilgrim community seems to double as the veterinarian.  Hoggett says, “Master Towbridge is more experienced at delivering lambs and foals than treating human maladies.”

In her fever, Charity hears the roar of some great beast which turns out to be a car — even worse, it is a car on a TV.  In the present, teenager Peter Wood [1] is also laid up with a fever, watching TV.  He is getting chilled orange juice and Advil, not so much with the bark and leaches.

He too gets a glimpse across time as he sees a pilgrim woman in his bedroom.  As the woman puts a damp cloth on Charity’s forehead, Peter feels the relief.  As Charity brushes her hand across a burlap blanket, she says it feels like a soft quilt.  There is a strange close up shot of Peter’s hand brushing over his soft quilt.  It is just a couple of seconds and too close to see the context — but was he copping a feel?

tzmessagecharity2The next day as Charity and Peter are each outdoors recuperating, they are able to communicate.  They learn that they both live close to Bear Rock near Harmon Brook in Massachusetts.  However, one lives there in a dark time when there is a dull uniformity of thought, great oppression, taxation without representation, and a ruling puritanical elite which gets the vapors if thou expresseth any perceived heresy; and Charity lives in 1700.   Heyooooo!

They are also able to see through each other’s eyes.  Peter looks at an airplane flying above to prove he is in the future.  She is still skeptical until Peter takes a drink of orange juice, now with 90% less scurvy.  He begins chowing down on all kinds of junk food to show her you how modern Americans eat.  Sadly, we do not get to see him vicariously enjoying Charity’s dinner of souse, scrapple and fetid water.

She asks him to look in a mirror so she can see what he looks like.  He asks her to look look into the brook so he can see her reflection.  It is love at second-sight.  Charity tells her friend Ursula of the miraculous things she has seen through Peter’s eyes — horseless carriages, boxes with likenesses of people many leagues [2] distant, men walking on the moon, and cheese in aerosol cans.

He shows her a library, takes a trip on an airplane, gives her a tour of Washington DC, and tells her of the Revolution (the one in her future, not the inevitable one in his future). For some reason, Peter’s father gives him a glass of wine, so Charity gets her first taste of alcohol.  Hoggett doesn’t cotton to her jocularity and thinks she is still not over her fever.  Ursula attributes Charity’s recent shenanigans to her being a witch.

tzmessagecharity5This is scientifically confirmed when one of the neighbors has a calf born with “a pinched up face and a third eye.”  Squire Hacker tells her he must search her whole teenage body for witchmarks, and “the search must be thorough for the devil’s ways are cunning.”  Charity belts him and runs as fast as her little buckled shoes will carry her.

She asks Peter to research whatever became of her.  He finds nothing about Charity being on trial for witchcraft, but does dig up some dirt on Squire Hacker.  She is able to leverage this into a not-guilty verdict. Charity ends their communication but leaves him a message which he finds 285 years later — their initials carved into a rock which miraculously is not underneath an 7-11.

For a not-your-father’s-Twilight Zone [3], this was a pretty great segment.  I completely bought into the design which felt like 1700.  The performances seemed perfectly suited to the era.  James Cromwell (Hoggett — OK, Obediah) only had a few scenes, but was convincing.  However, the episode was really carried by Kelly Noonan (Charity).  She seemed perfectly of that era in her accent and movement.  Robert Duncan McNeill (Peter) had a thankless job of having no one to play off of in almost every scene; also wearing giant 1980s glasses.  He did it about as well as possible, though.

I give it 1600 out of 1700.

Post-Post:

  • [1] The previous segment had a kid named Dickie and this one has a kid named Peter from the Wood family.  What the hell?
  • [2] I did not realize a league was a unit of distance other than under the sea.  On land, it is the distance one can walk in an hour, which seems pretty subjective for a unit of measurement.
  • [3] Although airing in 1985, maybe now it is your father’s Twilight Zone.
  • Peter and Charity were 16 and 11 in the short story.  Good move, upping her age.
  • Cromwell and McNeill went on to be big shots in the Star Trek world.  Sadly, the best of the lot, Kerry Noonan seems to have given up acting.  Maybe some scuzzy producer wanted to search her for actressmarks.
  • Classic TZ Legacy:  Michael (not J.) Fox was in 3 episodes of the 1960s series.
  • Available on YouTube.

Twilight Zone – Examination Day (11/01/85)

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tzexamination1Normally I don’t write about the 10-minute segments as they are filler between two longer-form segments.  In this case it is filler for only one longer-form segment, so I feel duty-bound to post (i.e. it is a chance to quickly burn off one day’s posting requirement).

Dickie Jordan is blowing out the twelve candles on his unappetizing gray birthday cake.  He foolishly squanders his birthday wish hoping that he scores well on the government examination.

His parents tell him not to worry about it.  Dickie informs them that everyone at at school has been talking about it and saying it was easy.  Besides, he gets good marks in school.

For his birthday, Dickie is thrilled to have received an Omni-Coder which seems to be a combination TV and Telephone.  C’mon, what is this, the year 3000?

Dickie goes to the testing facility.  His parents soon get a call — Dickie’s scores have exceeded the government standard. According to to law, he will be killed!  I hope they saved the receipt for that Omni-Coder.

tzexamination2I loves me a good twist, and I hates me some big government, but this is just crap.  Nothing here makes any sense.  It is a complete fabrication to set up the utterly predictable surprise ending.

The government kills anyone with an IQ over a given figure.  OK, I accept that as a premise.  But:

  1. Eleven year old kids never wonder what happened to all the bright twelve year olds they knew?  At least Logan’s Run came up with a cover story.
  2. Why does this society bother to even have schools?
  3. Are all parents as emotionless as these two at the prospect that their kid will likely be killed?  They cringe a couple of times, but their emotions are suppressed just to enable the twist.
  4. Dickie says everyone at school thought the test was easy.  So is the government killing off 99% of the population?  That matte painting above looks pretty spacious, not exactly Soylent Cabrini-Green.
  5. Dickie says the other kids thought the test was easy.  If they are so smart, why were they back in school?  Dickie didn’t even get to go home.
  6. tzexamination3His parents seem reasonably intelligent.  Were they ever tested? [1]
  7. Dad asks if Dickie would like to watch some TV before bed.  It is good foreshadowing to have Dickie prefer to read.  But why do they have him reading a comic book?  OK, if he were reading A Brief History of Time, I guess I would have questioned why it was still in print.
  8. Word never leaks out about this test?  News of this test would spread faster than that bullshit Kobayashi Maru test.  Actually, the concepts are very similar because both scenarios require the viewers to absolutely suspend any understanding of human nature. [2]
  9. If society is a bunch of dimwits, WTF built that Omni-Coder?  Do they not do that testing in South Korea?
  10. The government wouldn’t have to do this because, as usual, the private sector is doing it better.

I get that they were going for a Harrison Bergeron thing here, but the deck was just too stacked.  Maybe I’m expecting too much from what is essentially a one-act joke.

Post-Post:

  • If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had taken a test like this at 12, they would have both been safe.  Trump wouldn’t have known the answers, and Hillary would have lied to every question asked including name and date.
  • [1] In the short story by Henry Slesar, the parents are kind of dim, not knowing what makes grass green or how far away the sun is.  Uh, wait, I’m not sure on those.  I’m safe
  • [2] It still bugs me that this scene was so utterly botched in an otherwise very entertaining movie (the reboot, not Wrath of Khaaaan).
  • Directed by Paul Lynch.
  • Available on YouTube.

Trunk Release

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The emergency trunk release in a rental car I had recently.  Simple, elegant, puts the fun back into kidnapping.

That’s not really fair.  Every time I see this, I get a little vicarious thrill for the stick-person making their escape.  Well done.

trunk1

Pop — I’m outta here!